This book interrogates the relationship between time and vision as it emerges in five Italian films from the 1960s and 1970s: Antonioni's Blow-Up and The Passenger, Bertolucci's The Spider's ...
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This book interrogates the relationship between time and vision as it emerges in five Italian films from the 1960s and 1970s: Antonioni's Blow-Up and The Passenger, Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, Cavani's The Night Porter, and Pasolini's Oedipus Rex. The center around which these films revolve is the image of the crime scene—the spatial and temporal configuration in which a crime is committed, witnessed, and investigated. By pushing the detective story to its extreme limits, they articulate forms of time that defy any clear-cut distinction between past, present, and future—presenting an uncertain temporality which can be made visible but not calculated, and challenging notions of visual mastery and social control. If the detective story proper begins with a death that has already taken place, the death which seems to count the most in these films is the one that is yet to occur—the investigator's own death. In a time of relentless anticipation, what appears in front of the investigator's eyes is not the past as it was, but the past as it will have been in relation to the time of his or her search.Less

The Time of the Crime : Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film

Domietta Torlasco

Published in print: 2008-04-16

This book interrogates the relationship between time and vision as it emerges in five Italian films from the 1960s and 1970s: Antonioni's Blow-Up and The Passenger, Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, Cavani's The Night Porter, and Pasolini's Oedipus Rex. The center around which these films revolve is the image of the crime scene—the spatial and temporal configuration in which a crime is committed, witnessed, and investigated. By pushing the detective story to its extreme limits, they articulate forms of time that defy any clear-cut distinction between past, present, and future—presenting an uncertain temporality which can be made visible but not calculated, and challenging notions of visual mastery and social control. If the detective story proper begins with a death that has already taken place, the death which seems to count the most in these films is the one that is yet to occur—the investigator's own death. In a time of relentless anticipation, what appears in front of the investigator's eyes is not the past as it was, but the past as it will have been in relation to the time of his or her search.

This chapter examines the truth of the crime scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's film The Spider's Stratagem. It explains that this film dramatizes and complicates the vicissitudes of the repeating line ...
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This chapter examines the truth of the crime scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's film The Spider's Stratagem. It explains that this film dramatizes and complicates the vicissitudes of the repeating line and transfers Jorge Luis Borges' time labyrinth from the domain of language to that of vision. It analyzes the intricate the pattern of the film and suggests that it succeeds in articulating the temporality of the future anterior as the chiasm of light and darkness. This chapter also contends that full speech in the film coincides with the subject's assumption of a language that refers back to itself and with the emergence of truth as revelation.Less

Twilight

Published in print: 2008-04-16

This chapter examines the truth of the crime scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's film The Spider's Stratagem. It explains that this film dramatizes and complicates the vicissitudes of the repeating line and transfers Jorge Luis Borges' time labyrinth from the domain of language to that of vision. It analyzes the intricate the pattern of the film and suggests that it succeeds in articulating the temporality of the future anterior as the chiasm of light and darkness. This chapter also contends that full speech in the film coincides with the subject's assumption of a language that refers back to itself and with the emergence of truth as revelation.

It looks at two films made by Bertolucci - Spider’s Stratagem (1970) and The Conformist (1970) - which harness the Oedipal story to reflect on the conflict between the post-war and the post-1968 ...
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It looks at two films made by Bertolucci - Spider’s Stratagem (1970) and The Conformist (1970) - which harness the Oedipal story to reflect on the conflict between the post-war and the post-1968 generations. Both films deal with the national memory of fascism but they do so in the light of the post-1968 critique of parental authority and a symbolic rejection of the nuclear family as a site of social oppression. This chapter looks at the opportunities that these films provide for thinking about the dilemmas of male subject formation and male sexuality in the context of 1970s Italy.Less

Contesting National Memory: : Male Dilemmas and Oedipal Scenarios

Sergio Rigoletto

Published in print: 2014-08-31

It looks at two films made by Bertolucci - Spider’s Stratagem (1970) and The Conformist (1970) - which harness the Oedipal story to reflect on the conflict between the post-war and the post-1968 generations. Both films deal with the national memory of fascism but they do so in the light of the post-1968 critique of parental authority and a symbolic rejection of the nuclear family as a site of social oppression. This chapter looks at the opportunities that these films provide for thinking about the dilemmas of male subject formation and male sexuality in the context of 1970s Italy.

This chapter analyzes Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1967 documentary La via del petrolio as an experimental attempt to visualize the flow of oil from Iranian fields to Italian refineries, an attempt that ...
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This chapter analyzes Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1967 documentary La via del petrolio as an experimental attempt to visualize the flow of oil from Iranian fields to Italian refineries, an attempt that ultimately figures petroleum as a wondrous vehicle of transnational unity reconnecting post-World War II Europe. La via del petrolio (“The Oil Route”) was sponsored by ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi), Italy’s state-owned oil and gas company. The film uncovers how nationalist effusion dovetailed with petro-imperial overreach to weave a culture of exuberant potency, almost a corporate cult, around ENI and the future it promised for a dejected nation in the long aftermath of the war. This chapter examines how La via del petrolio relates to neorealism and suggests that it is a groundbreaking testament to how cinema as an art form and the industry of filmmaking overall can reflect a reality drenched in the promise of energy and petro-industrialization.Less

From Isfahan to Ingolstadt : Bertolucci’s La via del petrolio and the Global Culture of Neorealism

Georgiana Banita

Published in print: 2014-10-15

This chapter analyzes Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1967 documentary La via del petrolio as an experimental attempt to visualize the flow of oil from Iranian fields to Italian refineries, an attempt that ultimately figures petroleum as a wondrous vehicle of transnational unity reconnecting post-World War II Europe. La via del petrolio (“The Oil Route”) was sponsored by ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi), Italy’s state-owned oil and gas company. The film uncovers how nationalist effusion dovetailed with petro-imperial overreach to weave a culture of exuberant potency, almost a corporate cult, around ENI and the future it promised for a dejected nation in the long aftermath of the war. This chapter examines how La via del petrolio relates to neorealism and suggests that it is a groundbreaking testament to how cinema as an art form and the industry of filmmaking overall can reflect a reality drenched in the promise of energy and petro-industrialization.

The chapter recovers the context of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critical and theoretical formulation of “free indirect point-of-view” and shows how that apparatus allowed Pasolini to break down the ...
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The chapter recovers the context of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critical and theoretical formulation of “free indirect point-of-view” and shows how that apparatus allowed Pasolini to break down the conventional distinction between the self-conscious avant-garde cinema and the European realist cinema. The work of Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean-Luc Godard serve as crucial examples of this separation and provide firm ground for Pasolini’s evolving ideas on poetry and free indirect point of view.Less

Pier Paolo Pasolini and “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’”

P. Adams Sitney

Published in print: 2014-12-03

The chapter recovers the context of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critical and theoretical formulation of “free indirect point-of-view” and shows how that apparatus allowed Pasolini to break down the conventional distinction between the self-conscious avant-garde cinema and the European realist cinema. The work of Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean-Luc Godard serve as crucial examples of this separation and provide firm ground for Pasolini’s evolving ideas on poetry and free indirect point of view.